~8yrs ago (Dec’12) I got a job @Google. Those were still early days of cloud. I joined GCP @<150M ARR & left @~4B (excld GSuite). Learned from some of the smartest ppl in tech. But we also got a LOT wrong that took yrs to fix. Much of it now public, but here’s my ring-side view👇
By 2008, Google had everything going for it w.r.t. Cloud and we should’ve been the market leaders, but we were either too early to market or too late. What did we do wrong? (1) bad timing (2) worse productization & (3) worst GTM.
We were 1st to “containers” (lxc) & container management (Borg) - since '03/04. But Docker took LXC, added cluster management, & launched 1st. Mesosphere launched DCOS. A lot of chairs were thrown around re: google losing this early battle, though K8 won the war, eventually 👏
We were 1st to “serverless” (AppEngine). GAE was our beachhead -- it was the biggest revenue source early on but the world wasn’t ready for serverless primitives. We also didn’t build auxiliary products fast enough. Clients that outgrew GAE wanted “building block” IaaS offerings.
1st to hadoop (map-reduce ‘04) but our hosted Hadoop launched in ‘15. AWS EMR was ~200M ARR by then. 1st to cloud storage (GFS ’03), but didn’t offer a filestore till ‘18! Customers were asking for it since 2014. Didn’t launch archival storage or direct interconnect till v. late.
Common thread: engineering hubris. We had the best tech, but had poor documentation + no "solutions” mindset. A CxO at a large telco once told me “you folks just throw code over the fence”. Cloud was seen as the commercial arm of the most powerful team @ Google: TI (tech infra).
TI “built” stuff == good; Cloud “sold” stuff == bad. This unspoken hierarchy led to GTM decisions that cemented our #3 position in a market where we had far superior tech. Another reminder that BETTER TECH RARELY WINS AGAINST BETTER GTM:
As a result of this engg::product::sales tussle, we 2nd guessed if we were (1) platform or product (2) for developers or enterprises, serving (3) new age cloud-native cos or everyone. Steve Yegge has a legendary rant on #1: bit.ly/34RIYfV. KNOW WHO YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE!
A lot of early mistakes were made w/ #2-3: AWS was going to the customers and rolling cloud-compatible on-prem versions and direct interconnects to their DCs. We wanted more clients like Snapchat: cloud native. World had lots of goldman sachs: hybrid. GO WHERE THE CUSTOMERS ARE.
Sales teams without quotas (🤯); chaotic branding (GCP? Google Cloud? Google for Enterprise?); title inflation - everyone was “head of X” “lead of Y”; ill-conceived vertical solutions; weak partnership programs, etc. All this took years of fixing.
When TK joined from ORCL many old-timers left GCP to other parts of Google, but he was 100% the right person for the job: aggressive, customer-obsessed, sales oriented. My friends who stayed back speak of a very different org.
GCP is likely at $8-10B ARR now and still growing >50% y/y. This is remarkable, but MSFT came from behind and is now neck-to-neck w/ AWS. I am hardly shocked - for MSFT, an Azure contract was probably 1 extra pricing sheet under a pre-existing MSDN MSA. Zero legal friction.
My google exp reinforced a few learnings for me: (1) consumers buy products; enterprises buy platforms. (2) distribution advantages overtake product / tech advantages and (3) companies that reach PMF & then under-invest in S&M risk staying niche players or worse: get taken down.
As always, this is one person’s narrative so unlikely to be fully accurate. GCP is a much, much stronger platform and team today. Goes without saying, my heart will always root for Google Cloud. We are still scratching the surface of this beast and it is still day one. /end
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SaaS growth investing is on 🔥 the last few quarters. If you are a SaaS founder in the market to raise a growth round, here’s a quick summary of what to expect & how to prepare for these conversations, based on chats we’ve had w/ a bunch of growth funds in US and SEA recently👇
Some highlights: + SaaS public mkt multiples are, for the 1st time, ahead of private mkts; we are seeing >20x NTM rev, 30-40x ARR, pretty regularly + Y/Y rev growth & mkt leadership valued a lot + 1st check DD down from 90d to 2wks! + Clear post-covid narrative v. imp to raise
Before the raise 1/2: + Educate the market on your long-term story; PR/AR, 3rd party sources talking you up, etc. You want data points others can search & find. + Get customers prepped to talk and offer a few up front once the funds are looking to dig in. Why?
🤯 chat w Snowflake founding investor @laserlikemike last night - some gems: compounding effects of doing just *1* thing right over & over; 0 tolerance on ethics; look for 100x better solns* then ignore non believers; & conversational "gradient descent" to build conviction. 🙏
* as an example: snowflake could do a computational job in 2mins what took ORCL 30 days 😲. Conventional wisdom: "database is a solved problem".
On conversational 'gradient descent': Mike spoke to 300+ global DB experts to continually narrow down the problem scope in DB, TAM (entire DB market), and the technical soln. Over time when he met the snowflake founder, he knew he was (1) the best (2) got it exactly right.
We @LightspeedIndia are thrilled @Rephrase_AI is coming out of stealth. One of the smartest most iterative teams bldg AI-powered synthetic media solutions globally. Last yr, we met 3 geniuses w/ lip-sync AI; today you meet 3 geniuses w/ AI that mimics FULL FACES in 40 languages👇
.@Rephrase_AI founders @ashray_malhotra, @shivammangla09 & #NisheethLahoti are changing the way videos are created. Their generative AI can create personalized videos @ scale, w/o the cost & effort involved in video production. Think Mailchimp for videos w/ infinite variations.
Deep tech is *hard* as it is, and, on top of that, when you have to deal with Covid, you end up having to solve for customer needs by building green screens in hazmat suits! A founding team with deep pools of passion and creativity is what attracted us to @Rephrase_AI!
Happy 73rd India! Around for 1000s of yrs, but in charge of our destiny as a modern nation only since ‘47. In last 20 yrs, we’ve 6x-ed our GDP, touched the moon, left for mars, gone nuclear, digital & truly entrepreneurial. Major challenges yet to fix, but much to celebrate too👇
For most of the last 2000 yrs, India was ~25% of the world’s GDP (& pop). Under Mughal empire, we crossed Qing China & Western Europe as the world's largest economy. However, by end of british rule we were 1-2% of world GDP; a number we breached again in 1991 thx to “license raj”
It has taken a while, but we seem to be on our way -- especially since the early 2000s. Graph doesn’t cover it but it was nice to say hello to the UK and France as we passed them in 2019 ;-)
Today is my 4yr anniversary on twitter. I started using it only mid 2018 & had maybe ~150 friends then. I've since come to appreciate how valuable it is to just be able to snoop & learn from the back/forth b/w smart ppl. I'm no expert but few things helped me use twitter better:
The most important was to talk more about 'lived experiences' rather than 'learned experiences'. You are unique; people want to hear *your* story. This also helps avoid meaningless arguments (the 'yes, But...' kind) while you stay authentic to what you have personally experienced
The second was to curate my follows. Twitter has far too many smart people and I've tried to keep my follows to 100. It's not ideal but it forces me to choose between philosophers, creators, and curators. Leave 20% open for serendipity and fun e.g. @dodo 😁
Fall campus/MBA hiring is in full swing. 2020 is a tough year for jobseekers. I felt the pain of job-hunting post MBA in 2011-12 right when the fin crisis hit the EU hard. Took me 8mos to land a role @Google, where, over 5yrs, I learned what truly matters in a career; my 2c👇
1/ Career is a long game: before I got into Google, I was jobless for 8+mos & had been rejected by quite a few companies. I was v. close to overstaying my UK visa. One interview can change everything. If you are in the job market, keep learning, & keep meeting potential employers
Hardest was waking up daily & waiting… for rejections, interview calls, interview results, etc. Not knowing was the worst. I made a lot of mistakes here and in retrospect I’d (1) not “bulk apply” - pacing it out keeps things fresh & (2) tap my network - warm refs >> online apps.